ABSTRACT
The concept of sustainability encompasses all resource extraction, production and consumption of goods and services. Sustainability is simply human activity that might continue indefinitely. Originally tribal and territorial, species first conceived of ‘universal orders’, when the entire human race could be imagined as a single unit about 3,000 years ago. Coal, oil and gas are all forms of stored energy from the sun, the result of ancient plants and forests that grew in the oxygen-rich atmosphere of the carboniferous period, 300–350 million years ago. Since the Industrial Revolution have been raiding that stored sunlight and face the consequences. The survivalist discourse is radical because it challenges the notion of limitless growth, is prosaic because its solutions are within the constraints of industrialism. The several environmental problem-solving discourses are both reformist and prosaic because they all accept industrialism and their solutions are adjustments to the status quo.
